People across the world have long been challenged by the need to restrain their diet and eat healthy food. Diet related issues are mostly pertain to weight watching, but also include allergies of special kind, and avoidance of specific food. Different Users with a varied set of characteristics (e.g., age, gender, ethnicity, physical attributes, health conditions, skill level, general attitude, and others) would inherently have different needs and preferences.
The common approach to deal with this problem is to apply self-discipline. A User is instructed to avoid or limit certain foods (frequently sweets and in many cases high carbohydrate foods in general, and to attempt to count manually the Calories that one consumes. A User will typically do a poor job in estimating the volume of food he is eating and to figure the amount of Calories in each particular item. However, he will be able to determine much better than any computerized algorithm what exactly he is eating, although he may be wrong in many of the cases.
Another deficiency of the aforementioned common approach is the fact that it needs constant book keeping. The User needs to register constantly the amount of food he had. Unless he uses some sort of an application to write that data, he cannot keep a track of it, and compare the results to the actual weight fluctuations. Even if he does that, it is a very tedious task.
A product called Google Glasses is being marketed by Google Inc., and also described in U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 20130044042 (by Google Inc.), can be used in embodiments of the present invention. The Google Patent Application Publication is about a frame of glasses, a camera, microphone, and an electronic device embedded inside, that among other functions can be used to conduct Blue Tooth or other wireless communication. This Patent Application Publication does not specify any useful application associated with those glasses, and in particular nothing related to Calorie Counting or Food analysis as described in the present invention.
Another product called Telepathy One is also a wearable unit that is connected to the User ear, and includes a camera, and potentially a transmitter.
A product called Tellspec uses a laser transmitter and a spectrum receiver with belief that each food type will have a unique spectrum signature.
U.S. Pat. No. 8,345,930 describes a method of estimating a volume of one food item on a food plate. This patent gives a partial solution to some of the many issues described in the present invention, but it fails to show what the food type is in the ways described by embodiments of the present invention. The above '930 patent also lacks a disclosure of methods for analyzing how much of what is on the plate that the User actually ate and many other issues described in the present invention. In addition, the method of finding volume is improved vastly by embodiments of the present invention.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 8,299,930 and 8,310,368 each describe a method of estimating a Bite size. The methods that U.S. Pat. Nos. 8,299,930 and 8,310,368 each use to estimate a Bite size may be employed for embodiments of the present invention, but it depicts considerable disadvantages. For example, the User is forced to wear external elements inside his mouth (tooth sensor) on his body and wrist (accelerometer), so a fork movement or wrist movement will be detected and from that the logic will determine that a Bite chewing is done. As opposed to that, embodiments of the present invention teach using standard hardware that will become one day in regular use, like Google Glasses.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,914,468 suggests counting Bites for the sole purpose of controlling User's appetite. That patent does not use Food Type to determine the volume or weight of each Bite.
U.S. Pat. No. 8,330,057 describes a method for using an external container with sensitive scales and a processor to calculate the number of Calories in the food item based on weight, type of food and mode of preparation.
Video Scene analysis is an active research dated from the mid 1990's. There are many techniques proposed in the literature, pertaining to how to perform Scene Analysis on a Video scenery, which includes 30 (24) frames per second. In particular, Bouthemy et al proposed a template based architecture to analyze so called shots, which are detected using MPEG I Frames.
What is needed in the art is the disclosure of new systems and methods, which will be able to track a User, and grasp what he is eating, what is the content of that food and possibly analyze food intake vis-à-vis the User Calorie balance and body weight plan.